


Aftermath: Sam

by rabidsamfan



Series: Aftermath [1]
Category: Attack the Block (2011)
Genre: Gen, Post-Movie, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 17:04:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8999398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidsamfan/pseuds/rabidsamfan
Summary: Sam tries to deal with what's happened.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shoemaster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoemaster/gifts).



When the uniformed officers hand her off to a plain-clothes detective superintendent, Sam has to start all over again from the beginning. The DS - a big Northerner who clearly doesn’t believe a word Sam is saying -- tells her he wants corroboration, so she points out the girls who are standing at the edge of the crowd, and _they_ can’t get drawn into the conversation without pulling in a tall, thin boy with a wild frizzy mop of hair they call Biggz. And Sam remembers that there were five boys, a century ago at the beginning of the night. Remembers Dennis and Pest and Jerome all trying to call their friend at one time or another. Remembers that he’s been trapped in a bin, with one of the aliens after him. So he’s part of this, even if he hasn’t been one of the people who’s shared the worst night of her life. 

She doesn’t know if he knows. She doesn’t think so, not from the way he’s bouncing and craning his neck to watch as the police stream in and out of the block. When the DS gets called on his radio and excuses himself for a moment, Sam reaches for the tall boy’s sleeve. “Biggz,” she says softly, and he freezes, turning to look at her with eyes that widen when he recognizes the woman he helped to rob. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you Sam?” he squeaks, and it would be funny in a different world, with his mobile face and breaking voice.

“Jerome and Dennis...” She swallows, trying to find the hardest words “I’m sorry. I couldn’t...”

“Jerome?” Dimples wails, and grabs Sam, spinning her around. “Did he get his head took off like Dennis?”

Sam doesn’t know. “It was smoky. I couldn’t see Jerome. I grabbed Pest and we ran for it. But he said...” she swallows, closes her eyes and tries again. “He said Jerome was caught by his feet. At least at first.”

Much to her surprise, Biggz pulls her into an awkward hug. “Moses texted me. Said you did the best you could. Said you was going to get everything ready so he could save us.” And Sam still hasn’t recovered from that, not really, not when she could just as easily have been getting everything ready for Moses to die. “Said you saved his life.”

“She did,” one of the girls says. Sam thinks she might be called Bubbles. “She stabbed that thing at Tia’s place right through the head.”

Sam shivers. On the highlight reel in her head of all the horrible moments of the night, the feeling of the knife going into that thing’s chin has an unfortunate place of honor. Then, unexpectedly, she is engulfed in warm arms, as the girls join the hug, murmuring thanks at her that she isn’t sure she deserves. “Tia saved him first,” she manages, doing her best to change the focus of attention to someone else. 

That works, because Tia immediately gives credit to Dimples, and the girls end up being pulled away into the edges of the crowd, where youths that actually have coats are asking for more details. Classmates, perhaps, or neighbors from other parts of the block. Sam isn’t sure. But she is left with Biggz, and he lets go and steps back, giving her an uncertain smile.

Sam looks at him, and then looks harder, realizing that Moses must not have told him everything. “Your coat. Did he tell you to take off your coat?” Now she’s the one squeaking, but that’s the fear. “Did he tell you how the creatures knew who to hunt?” She can’t help but look past him, toward the block, to see if any of the creatures escaped Moses’s trap. If he’s contaminated her clothing...

“He said they sniffed the goopy stuff from the first one,” Biggz says, unalarmed. “But I ain’t hardly even touched it, except my shoes, and see?” He holds up a stockinged foot. “Besides, I been in a stinky bin all night. And I ain’t worried none. If Probs and Mayhem can take one of them gorilla wolf-things out, you think all them po-po can’t?”

“Probs and Mayhem?” Sam is losing track of all the nicknames. And the slang.

Biggz waves a hand at two over-excited young boys. They’re giving a policewoman a headache as she tries to keep them wrapped in blankets. Sam remembers them from the corridor, remembers them trying to get the older boys to take them seriously. Remembers Moses telling them to go inside and stay there, where they would be safe. “Reginald is Probs, and Gavin is Mayhem,” Biggz explains. “Check it! They soaked that thing in petrol and then lit it up with a rocket. Believe!” He makes an explosion noise, waving his arms to illustrate. “Figure they can call themselves whatever they want.”

******************

When the DS returns it becomes clear that the entire block is a crime scene, as far as the police are concerned, at least until the forensics people get done, and they want to interview **everyone**. Given that half the people in the crowd evacuated without proper weather gear on the Fifth of November and they really want to go back indoors, this is problematic. The police start herding them into the park, but Biggz hollers, “Don’t no one step on the space ship!” and that has some people backing up (mostly the ones who actually saw the gorilla wolf things) and some of them surging forward (including Probs and Mayhem, who _did_ see the gorilla wolf things, but managed to kill one, so they’re good with that) and some of them just milling uselessly. Two of the police officers try to catch the younger boys, so they see the crater, and make everyone back away again, which makes the Detective Superintendent annoyed and call for still more back up, and for buses to take everyone over to the school, where they can be housed and processed in the warm. 

*****************

Sam doesn’t get to ride in the buses. The girls and Biggz are ushered onto one, along with the two little boys and any of the other youngsters who seem unattached to an adult. But she’s a principal witness, so she ends up sitting in the back of the bully van with Moses and Pest. Her hands aren’t in cuffs, and she’s not in the cage, but she has a feeling that it wouldn’t take much for the exasperated officers to decide to change that. It gives her the creeps, being in the same position she basically was the first time she saw someone killed by one of the aliens, and she leans closer to the barrier, and wishes she dares to open it and crawl in beside Moses. Wishes that she actually had thanked Dennis, so few hours ago, for saving her life. There won’t be a chance now. 

She fumbles out the mobile in her pocket, and checks the battery. “Is there anyone I should call for you?” she asks. “Anyone who’s going to worry?”

Moses shakes his head, but Pest brightens. “Can you call my gran?”

“Certainly. Do you know the number?”

He rattles it off and Sam dials, glad of the chance to do something, anything, but there is no answer to the ringing. “Does she take it with her when she goes out?”

“Sometimes,” Pest admits. “When she’s not flustered.”

“I expect she’s flustered tonight,” Sam says. “But Biggz and the girls saw you get arrested. I’m sure they’ll tell her that you surv...” she swallows and looks down at her hands. “That you’re okay.”

“Not like Dennis. Or Jerome.” Moses says, and she can hear the bleak note. It isn’t fair. He’s done so much tonight. Taken on so much more than her own fifteen year old self could have possibly imagined. Lost so much more than her adult self wants to contemplate.

Sam makes herself look up, meet his eyes. “Do you want me to call their families?”

His head moves slowly from side to side. “It ought to be me that tells them. It’s my fault. My responsibility.”

“No,” Sam says, firmly. “No. Your responsibility ended with nearly getting yourself killed making sure no one else would die.” 

He shakes his head, more emphatically now. “But if no one else had the stuff on them...”

Sam bangs her hand against the cage to get his attention. “Do you think those things would have stopped killing once they found what they were looking for? Do you think they would just melted away, like a bad dream? You saw what happened when Tia attacked the one in her flat! It went after her -- and she’d never had any contact with the pheromone. You saw their teeth. Would they have stopped being hungry just because the sun came up?”

Moses blinks at her. “I don’t...”

“Those officers, the ones who got killed first. They weren’t covered in pheromone. But they died anyway, right? Do you really think that just touching your jacket was enough to get them killed?”

Pest pulls a face. “She’s right, bruv.”

“And what if we got it wrong? What if the first one wasn’t just a female? What if it was the queen, like an ant or a bee. What if it was the clever one? The one that would tell the others just how to kill us more effectively. What if this isn’t the only place where those things came to Earth?”

“It wasn’t,” says a voice behind her, and she startles, crowding back against the cage beside Moses as she turns, even though the sensible part of her brain knows perfectly well that the youth isn’t in any position to protect her now. She finds herself facing a man leaning in through the doorway of the van, wearing a reflective police jacket over ordinary clothes. He’s younger than she is, probably halfway between her and Moses, really, and his color is halfway between too. The smile he offers them both is automatic and distracted. “I’ve had reports -- reports I trust -- that there were another seven landings near Oxford, and a possible set of six near Southend, although I haven’t had independent confirmation of those yet.”

“They were in the river,” says a dark-skinned girl, who appears in the doorway behind him. Incongruously enough, she appears to be dressed in a wetsuit. “You know Mama won’t have made a mistake about that.” She tosses her head a little, and Sam sees water fly off the end of her braids. 

“I know,” the man says, looking back over his shoulder to his odd companion.. “And Nightingale’s doing his best to convince the Commissioner. But it’s not an easy idea to get through people’s heads. They know magic’s real because we can do it right in front of their faces, but space aliens?” He shakes his head. “Seawoll’s ready to choke.”

Magic’s real? Sam wants to ask, but Pest is quicker off the mark.

“We figured out they was aliens, easy peasy.”

“Who are you?” Moses asks, suspiciously. “And why should we listen to anyfin’ you have to say?”

“I’m Peter Grant, Special Constable. And you’ve got it backwards. I’m here to listen to you.”


End file.
